Vibe coded mods are a massive threat to Workshop and this game - Fast action required#81

Over the weekend, a specific individual has vibe coded and uploaded out 13 mods of ports from other games. This is 18% of the current Workshop. 18% of all mods were one person’s AI generation in one weekend. This has singlehandedly pushed a lot of mods off of the most recent, and is drowning out actual effort. These mods do not function properly either, and with them being spammed, most unaware people are going to download these as their first Workshop mods, and think that mods for this game in general just aren’t good and drop the game before giving actual mods a try. I genuinely believe this is an immediate threat to the game, and needs action. Because if one person can do this, what’s stopping more? And once more do it, it’ll drown out all of Workshop, demotivating actual modders for creating.

At minimum it might be good to have an “AI Assisted” tag to apply to mods so that people who don’t want those sorts of mods can filter them out. This won’t stop people engaging in bad faith, of course, but it should help.

(Ideally it would be nice to have a blanket ban against AI Assisted content)

This is incredibly important. Workshop’s success is a critical piece of the game’s longevity, and allowing AI-created entries severely dilutes its quality. Due to the nature of generative AI being magnitudes faster than real human effort, it will be impossible for even a large number of human creators to outpace a potential flood of AI content. And it only takes the decision of one/a few AI submitters to make that a reality.

I implore the dev team to implement some kind of ban on AI-generated submissions.

Anything other than a full force ban on all gen AI would be very difficult to enforce, as the line drawn between what’s acceptable and what isn’t would be too hard to determine. That’s why I feel a complete ban to be the cleanest and most effective measure to take, but even less severe restrictions would help.

I understand that there would be a lot of pushback against any decision like this, but the devs need to be prepared to stomach that and take a firm stance now, before it gets out of hand and pushes people away from the game.

There is a difference between Gen AI and AI assisted coding. Personally, “vibe coded” mods (specifically the coding part) I have less of a strong opinion on, especially for ported characters since there is not a lot of creative input on that.

However, we should at very least have a “AI assisted” tag for workshop. Many different people have different views on AI, but allowing users to filter the workshop if they dont want that is a good compromise.

Frankly, the devs don’t even need to take a hard stance on AI assistance/vibe coding to deal with this person. Banning them on the grounds that they are spamming would be completely reasonable.

I think the pressure for this needs to be directed more at Steam itself rather than Aether Studios. With the devs stretched thin it’s hard to expect them to watch over every workshop submission and it’s also within Steams TOS to allow that content without a label.

We also have to make sure we upvote and use the tools steam provides to hoist well made content and rank lower that stuff that’s broken or unstable. There’s still going to be customers to this game that want the AI stuff. It’s hard to keep up with the pace of AI but it’s in demand and modding allows people to make what they want of their games.